Category → Family
Don’t leave your records in the sun and other solid life tips
John Hartford played every instrument I could imagine – fiddle, guitar, banjo, harmonica, spoons, sticks, rocks, fence posts, and he played them all well. He was a 20th century artist from the days of the American frontier, or maybe the 1850s traveling circuses, with his crumpled top hat and tatty clothing. Only occasionally obliquely bawdy, most of his songs were silly and clean fun, done in the folk music style that every American enjoys on a sweaty summer day. Summer time is the time to forget all of your anxieties and frustrations, and let traveling entertainers like John Hartford make you laugh with gusto.
Golly, we are just about in summer time, aren’t we? Time for the Artists’ Fair (or is it the Artisans’ Fairies?) in State College, with non-fraudulent all natural ice cream from PSU’s The Creamery. Hot and sweaty guaranteed in the heart of summer. Time to start planning your summer trips, if you have not already done so. And if you find hotels full or too expensive, there is always the local county fair to fall back on, or The Grange Fair in Centre Hall.
Ahhhh, the Grange Fair in Centre Hall, a family staple of ours….My sister puked on one of those big spinny roundy roundy pill-shaped rides that make me sick just to watch, and her vomit hit everyone locked in the cage with her, as well as the many innocent bystanders running for cover. I have not been back to the Grange Fair since that Great Vomit Assassination On The Grassy Knoll in 1977. But I hear the fair is still great. John Hartford could have written a funny song about that vomit event.
Anyhow, John Hartford performed many silly songs, including my favorite, Don’t Leave Your Records in the Sun. For you young people, a record is a round shiny object we used to listen to for entertainment. Now I think you can find videos online of people eating them for entertainment. But they did make pleasing sounds, including music, and if played slowly backwards you might hear Satan’s voice saying something almost on the tip of your tongue. They sure were a lot more entertaining than the chip embedded in your skull these days. And if you left them in the sun, as John Hartford warned us not to do, they would in fact get warped, and they would skip and repeat and make all kinds of annoying sounds.
I have recently learned another piece of useful folk wisdom that John Hartford should have sung about: Don’t leave your butternut squash anywhere you don’t want them to die and make a mess. Because when a butternut squash dies, it takes the surrounding environment with it.
Some of my prized butternut squash (I grow them in my summer garden and eat them all year long; the Princess of Patience savors the seeds roasted with salt) were stored up high on a pine board shelf in a cold guest bedroom hardly used during the winter. I put them there in January, thinking I would pull one down as needed, but last week, when I went to get one, all I found were these horrible science experiments gone wrong. I think the best thing is to keep your prized squashes on a metal rack in the basement for maybe a month or two at longest, after they are picked in late October. Then you have to skin them and cut them up and freeze them in plastic bags.
Or if you have a warped sense of humor, you can deliberately let your butternut squashes die badly, and make a Rumble video about it. Maybe a video of some circus geek eating these dead squashes with a side of crushed record. You would probably get a million hits and become a famous influencer.
Dear John Hartford, we miss you. I saw him at his last performance in State College, when he was in the throes of cancer. I heard he wanted to write a silly song about that, too. Don’t do that, is my advice.
Don’t leave your records in the sun or your butternut squash on a board, shelf, or really anywhere
Kinda proud to say “I made that!”
No, you cannot even make a tea from this horror. Throw it away
Flintlock season recap
- Gunmaker Mark Wheland with the gun of my dreams, a flintlock English Sporting Rifle made just for me
Writing a blog is a delicate walk, because as much as I want to write about the righteous boss daddy treatment President Trump gave to weasel rat dictator Zelensky the other day, I have to stay focused on what our audience of exactly One Person has requested. If I turn off my one reader, then I will literally be writing solely for the air and the stars.
For the record, just because you or I call Zelensky (Ukraine) the weasel rat dictator he is, does not mean that you or I automatically like or support dictator Putin (Russia). Both of these men are in power because they have subverted their nations’ elections, amassed wealth and power at the expense of their countrymen, etc. Yes, Putin is responsible for the war in Ukraine, and yes, Ukraine can and should negotiate a settlement that ends the bloodshed. And yes, Trump should demand and expect to receive rare earth metals in return for all of the taxpayer support Americans have given to Ukraine. This is all normal.
Wanting the war to go on and on with greater bloodshed and destruction on both sides and with more powerful rockets is not normal. That is warmongering.
Anyhow, the late hunting season here in Central Pennsylvania was exciting, but had no filled tags. I used to rabbit hunt a lot, but gave up when the rabbit populations showed signs of vaporizing due to abundant fishers and bobcats. For five or six years now I have hardly seen one rabbit in places where I have created the best habitat, and where rabbits should be swarming. So for many years I have just hunted the late flintlock season for deer, instead, just about daily.
And also trapped for predators, including fishers and bobcats. Not this season, however. On the December flight back from Florida, a man behind me kept coughing and sneezing. He never covered his mouth, and made no attempt to keep from infecting everyone around him. Sure enough, a week later I was showing signs of the same horrible illness half the country has now had, a persistent dry cough and a close brush with pneumonia. Lots of people are getting the pneumonia. So, I was sick as hell during the time I normally set traps, and my kit and steel just sat and sat.
Instead, just about every day after Christmas, I would go out for a couple hours and try to intercept a deer with the new flintlock, coughing quietly into my clothes to muffle the bark. I got off a lot of shots, collected blood and hair, but filled no tags. A new white checked Filson wool coat helped me blend in with the snowy woods.
Made for me by Mark Wheland, the new flintlock is a 62-caliber rifle based on the English Sporting Rifle design, which I have come to admire. It has a 28 inch decently swamped octagonal barrel by Getz from about 15 years ago, a beautiful patent breech made by Jason Schneider at Rice Barrels, a RE Davis late-flintlock era Manton-style waterproof lock, and a gorgeous stock of highly figured and irridescent English walnut. Wheland turned a perfect ebony ramrod, as well as its horn end and its threaded steel connector end.
The Manton-style lock has a roller frizzen, which is both very fast and also very touchy. Hunting in brush without bumping the heel of my hand up against the back of the frizzen would result in some blade of grass flicking it open and dumping the priming powder on the ground. So it requires some special handling, because it is so sensitive.
I also struggled with this gun’s sights all season long, probably also slowly acclimating to the short barrel. This barrel is ten inches shorter than that on my long-time go-to 54 caliber flintlock barrel, that is 38″ long, and my eyes have not yet made the transition. Moreover, the new gun has classic British rear sights, one standing and one folding leaf. The rear sites were conveyed to me with only the most rudimentary and shallow “V” filed in the standing sight, and the front sight was about a half inch high. It was up to me, in a short amount of time, to get this gun sighted in just days before bear season began, which is just days before deer season started.
So I just struggled to get the gun sighted in, and by the time actual flintlock season began, the day after Xmas, it was printing dead center and 2.5″ high at 50 yards. With 130 grains of FFG Swiss pushing the 335-grain lead round ball about 1500 feet per second, I reckoned it was probably dead-on at 100 yards. Or minute-of-deer chest within 100 yards.
I lost track of how many shots I took at deer. Mostly at does. One probably legal buck I let walk past me. Some deer I literally just walked right up to in the snow, and missed, maybe forty yards away. Others I ambushed from concealment on trail crossings, from fifty out to about 95 yards, while sitting. Each miss resulted in a little more blacking being put on the rear sight, a little more color added here or there, and by the end of the season the front sight was filed down to about 1/8″ high and painted bright neon orange. The rear sight has a bright neon yellow inverted V wedge under the V aperature, surrounded by black. I am thinking about scrapping the entire arrangement and going to front and rear fiber optic sights. Old eyes…
One doe was flattened by what seemed like a perfect broadside at 75 yards. I saw her go down through the cloud of smoke, and when I walked up I expected to find her stone cold dead. But while there was a perfect outline of her body in the snow, with plenty of blood, the actual deer was nowhere to be found. With dusk fast approaching, I used my headlamp to follow as far as I could in the snow and the thick brambles, and then went home. The next morning I returned and took up the trail, which resulted in three deer fleeing from fresh beds, one of which had some fresh drips of blood, but not much. Not even the coyotes would end up eating her.
My last shot of the season was taken like a mortar, at the biggest buck I have ever seen in the wild. He was just a bit over 200 yards away, and had been spooked out of his hidey nook by my prowling. When I snuck back towards the anticipated cut-off, he was indeed standing right there, looking all around, on high alert. While down wind, I was as close as I could get without being seen. So I took some pictures of him, which of course did not come out well, and then took careful aim with plenty of “Kentucky elevation” and let ‘er rip. At the shot he flew away with wings, and on my follow up I found where the big lead ball had hit the ground at plane, leaving a 20-foot-long long streak through the snow and dirt directly in line with the buck’s shoulder, but about 20 yards too short. His tracks were among the biggest I have ever seen. Guessing a 200″ buck.
The doe was flattened, and leaked some hydraulic fluid, but was gone and lived on
I have a lot more practice to do with this gun.
What looks like a shallow white “W” is just the higher visibility part of the huge buck’s enormous rack
Overnight beds, tiny amount of blood, a mere flesh wound and a long-lived lucky deer
The long path cut by the 335-grain round ball on its way towards the big buck
Nice view down into the woods, perfect for a flintlock. Yes, the barrel key is loose, which accounted for two missed shots
Hunting around an enormous buck capable of leaving big rubs like this one is excitement enough. Actually seeing him and getting a shot…even the miss is the highlight of the season
Hunting season re-cap
By popular demand by our one, single reader, we are going back in time a week or three, to when most hunting seasons ended. I was asked for a recapitulation of my own end of the hunting season, which, depending on which one we are talking about, could have been the end of January or mid February or even last week.
This past season was tough for me, for the simple reason that I am still recovering from a covid-related “medical event,” which really took the starch out of my shirt, the wind out of my sails, the gumption out of my Gump. Bit over a year ago, I was running the sawmill, stacking lumber, sawing logs, working very hard, getting ready for an annual out-of-state solo wilderness hunt that I do just about every year. It is a great hunt, whether I actually pull the trigger, or not, and it has resulted in both super Zen mind settling re-sets as well as the biggest bodied buck and the biggest bear I have ever killed.
So I was working overtime in the crisp Fall air filled with the sweet scent of falling oak leaves, trying to get a bunch of logs to disappear and become lumber, and enjoying the feeling of being in really great condition, and feeling physically powerful. Nothing like bossing big oak logs around with a cant hook and a pickaroon to make a guy feel strong.
By the end of the week I was in absolute beast mode. I might have been a bit heavy, but I was incredibly strong and in fabulous cardiovascular conditioning (proven by a radioactive dye test that same spring where the cardiologist told me I had the heart of an 18 year old). Over the years, I have made hunting guides and forest rangers alike laugh and shake their heads at the improbability of my non-svelte ability to carry a heavy pack and a rifle, and just go go go keep going to wherever we are going in the Scottish Highlands and many other mountain ranges from Maine to Alaska.
So I was ripped and in fantastic condition, ready to make the long drive to the out of state destination, just exit the truck, throw my pack on, grab my rifle, and head in about four to six miles. When finally out there, I live out of a Seek Outside teepee tent, which with a small titanium wood stove provides all the comforts of home I could ever need. Living on home made dried fruit, jerky, and Gatorade powder keeps everything super simple.
Hours before leaving, I woke up, feeling like I was about to die. Eventually convinced that I was in fact dying, I drove myself forty minutes to the nearest hospital, and turned myself in to the ER staff at 4AM.
“Whatever you are here for, you are in the right place,” said the wizened old lady at the ER check-in. Apparently I looked just as dandy as I felt.
Handfuls of blood clots from a freak Covid clot were sprinkled around my lungs and heart, which accounted for why I felt like I was dying. That I did not die right away amazed everyone medical. Had I reached my hunting destination without dying on the highway, I would have died in the teepee tent, and forest rangers would have had to recover my fat body in the middle of a designated wilderness area. Which would have scored me no points with people I am always trying to impress.
So, when your aging carcass nearly croaks like that, and you cannot breathe or move for months, your body begins to atrophy. Overnight. On an old body like mine, the warranty ran out long ago, and things and parts and bits of it just start going their own way. Months and tens of pounds of fat later, I was learning to walk again. Forget carrying heavy packs and rifles, just walking from one end of a damned log landing to the other end was a chore. Carrying a chainsaw? Unimaginable.
Two types of blood clots are related to Covid: The kind of “regular” red blood cell clot, which got me, which my cardiologist said they saw an enormous spike of from early 2020 to 2022, and the white, gooey clot that seems to result from the purported Covid “vaccine” shot. I never got the faux Covid vaccine shot, but I did have Covid at least twice, possibly three times. And so even a year or two later, people like me were still experiencing “late Covid” symptoms. Including death clots from out of the middle of nowhere, including originating from impossible parts of the body (not in deep muscle).
Whatever China cooked up in their Frankenstein lab in Wuhan, it was a real bitch, and China owes America at least a trillion dollars for all of the damage and death they inflicted on us. Screw you, China, you bastards ruined my fabulous annual solo hunt and kept me from doing it again the next year, too. Make your bill two trillion bucks.
So, this past hunting season, beginning in October, I was just starting to really move again. But it was slow going, and slowed down more by the incredible amount of excess baggage I had stashed away around my gut. But whaddaya know, those old timers who used to talk about their elder years being their best hunting skills time…they were right. Because when I started moving through and across our hills, fields, and especially our Pennsylvania mountains, I was by necessity moving slooooowly.
And when you move slowly, you move silently, and with more attention paid to your surroundings. This results in seeing more animals, at closer distances, than usual. Being close range to prey animals with a rifle in your hand is usually a recipe for success.
In rifle season I killed two deer up in the mountains this way, the slow, sickly, deadly old man way. Then I returned south to the mostly Flatlands, and proceeded to again slowly sneak up on a doe in the middle of a wind storm with snow on the ground, and shoot her with a lever action rifle at about twenty-five yards. I was starting to feel a lot better physically, and about life.
Later on, in the late season, I really struggled to master a new flintlock rifle, for which I had waited two years, after taking a year of my time just to assemble the parts. I will write about hunting deer with this beautiful new flintlock rifle tomorrow, as Part Two of this report.
NFL continues its war against America
Americans watching the Super Bowl last night were excited to see 100% displays of merit, risk taking, sacrifice, and hard work compete against each other. As President Trump said yesterday, while at the game in New Orleans, the Super Bowl is about our shared American values and patriotism.
But that is where patriotism and good values started and ended for the day, as the NFL continued its culture war against America and everything that is good. From a racially divisive opening “black national anthem” to an unintelligible, bizarre halftime show, to ads that mocked the very merit-based and skin color-blind game unfolding on the field, the NFL is apparently quite determined to go against the grain of the American people and the resurgence of all-American values like hard work and fair play.
Yes, for the first time in many years, I actually sat and watched a NFL game. If only to be with close friends and their children. We ate an early dinner together, and the entire first half I slept on a couch in a sun room far from the TV, trying to catch up on sleep lost the night before to one of the horrendous colds circulating this year. I should have stayed on that couch, because I got up to watch the halftime “show.”
It was embarrassing for the performers, especially the main guy, whose guttural barks and growls were only occasionally overshadowed by the strange and disconnected gyrations of the mute Hamas-appearing actors. It was audial and visual gibberish. I have no idea what that was all about, but I can absolutely say it was not entertaining. It was weird.
The NFL still has not learned what basic Americans like me want, because the NFL managers don’t care what we want. The NFL is determined to cram a lot of junk down our throats. Now that I have seen my friends and spent high quality time catching up with them, I will go back to my life devoid of all things NFL. Since 2016 and the advent of millionaire sports players kneeling in disrespect to America, I have also taken the proverbial knee to the NFL, and just sat them out.
Despite growing up with Penn State football and enjoying NFL games since I was probably ten, I now mark nine years and counting since jumping ship and spending my time better. If NFL makes you happy, good, enjoy it.
I will say that it is difficult to understand how “happy” celebrating people then go on a destructive attack on their own cities, their neighbors’ private property, their local store fronts, and public infrastructure. I really must be missing something about the meaning of the guttural moans, barks, mews, and growls that formed the core of the “entertainment” last night. Don’t count on me to try to figure it out.
Congratulations to the Eagles football team, for having played well with your non-DEI assemblage, made up of merit-only players.
Sweet Ellen Greenberg’s last two minutes alive
On a cold winter evening in January, 2011, pretty, sweet, gentle, tiny 27-year-old Ellen Greenberg was brutally murdered, stabbed to death in her back and chest twenty times with a kitchen knife that only moments before she had been using.
In addition to the homicidal wounds, one of which severed her spinal cord and rendered her body completely limp, which meant subsequent stabs must have been done with real rage, the autopsy of her body also showed deep bruising on her legs, torso, and arms, old and new. Marks around her neck showed that she had been recently strangled. Her body showed the signs that physically abused people typically carry. Ellen had probably been physically abused for a long time.
So when Ellen was making herself a small meal in the kitchen in which she was about to be attacked, she had already packed up her personal things, including her makeup. She had locked the apartment door, including the inner latch, because she wanted to be left alone. She had made up her mind to move out of the apartment she shared with her fiance, Sam Goldberg, either going home to Harrisburg, or moving in with one of her friends. Ellen had not yet made up her mind where.
For the past fifteen minutes, Sam had been texting Ellen, asking her to unlock the inner door latch, so that he could get into the apartment. Apparently Ellen had been ignoring him, because his last text said “You have no idea.”
Apparently Sam was in a rage.
Seconds later Sam kicked in the door, which broke the inner latch, and the rest of what happened seems clearly obvious to everyone except the corrupt Philadelphia Police, the corrupt Philadelphia DA’s office, and now a formerly corrupted or confused medical examiner, Dr. Marlon Osbourne, all of whom said sweet Ellen’s death was a suicide.
The man who conducted Ellen’s autopsy, who saw the bruises and the stab wounds from behind, who saw the photo of a large clump of Ellen’s hair on the kitchen floor, who initially ruled her death a suicide, Dr. Osbourne, has now changed his official opinion to “death not by suicide,” which sounds a hell of a lot like a line from a purposefully ridiculous Monty Python skit.
In other words, Dr. Osbourne now says Ellen was murdered, to which everyone around the world who has a heart and a brain says “No sh*t, Sherlock.” We already knew this years ago. It only took a lawsuit against Dr. Osbourne by Ellen’s parents and a pending court appearance to finally elicit his honest opinion, again.
Minutes after Ellen had slumped to the floor, Sam Goldberg called his uncle and his cousin, both of whom are criminal defense lawyers who live near the apartment Ellen shared with Sam. Only after Sam spoke with his lawyer relatives did he call 911, and tell the dispatcher “She fell on a knife.”
Now that Dr. Osbourne has changed his opinion about Ellen’s death, the law demands that a real criminal investigation be conducted. There is no statute of limitations on murder. And Ellen’s personal journal can finally be released from Dr. Osbourne’s office to her parents and to whomever is going to be investigating her murder, and whomever is going to be investigating the blatant coverup.
I mean, surely someone in law enforcement wants to know how Sam’s uncle, who is both a criminal defense lawyer and a former judge, was allowed full access into the apartment right after Ellen’s death. We know that the lawyer uncle left the apartment with some of Ellen’s personal belongings, including her computer.
Other glaringly obvious questions come to mind: What did Sam’s uncle take from the apartment? Why did he take them? What did he do with them?
Why has Dr. Osbourne’s office clung to Ellen’s personal journal all these years, unwilling to release it? If no murder happened, then why not release it, right? Why say Ellen suicided herself, but then act like you know she was murdered, Dr. Osbourne? Wonder what that journal says!
Why did the Philadelphia Police behave so casually about Ellen’s death? Her blood was splattered all over her kitchen, and her battered body showed the usual signs of a homicide. Her clump of hair on the kitchen floor was from someone grabbing her hair and violently pulling it (probably to bend her over to be able to stab her in the back of her neck).
Why did the Philadelphia DA’s office send representatives to an early 2011 meeting with the Medical Examiner and the Philly police, and have them ask that Ellen’s death certificate be changed from homicide to suicide?
What is the connection between the 2011 Philadephia DA’s office and Sam’s family? Obviously both were “in the business” together, and probably knew each other. Did that relationship somehow color the medical examiner’s decision to change his office’s initial finding of homicide?
Even more bizarre was the decision by then – PA AG Josh Shapiro to let stand the suicide ruling just a couple years ago, despite lots of new evidence that said otherwise. Shapiro also had a personal relationship with Sam’s family, and a political relationship, too.
Just so, so many tangled relationships in this whodunit murder, and not enough transparency about them!
Justice for Ellen demands that some outside professional outfit conduct the subsequent investigation into who murdered her. Who can do it? Josh Shapiro is now the governor, and he oversees the PA State Police. That means he could influence any investigation they would do. The FBI is completely corrupt, infiltrated, politicized, and untrustworthy, so they are out.
I don’t know who can investigate who murdered sweet Ellen Greenberg, but at this point, there is so much physical and circumstantial evidence out in public already that all we really need is an outdoor court room with split rail seating, a horse, a rope, and a tree.
I volunteer to slap the horse in the ass.
Great American Outdoor Show is under way
The Great American Outdoor Show is under way here in Harrisburg, PA, and I highly recommend that everyone who can visit it before it ends this weekend. It is held at the Farm Show complex between Cameron Street and MaClay Street, which is something like ten or fifteen acres of space. And this show fills that all up with vendors of every sort, visitors, lots and lots of hunting and fishing guides and outfitters (I am not really clear on what the difference is between a guide and an outfitter) from all around the world, hunting dog trials in the arena, hunting how-to demonstrations, calling contests, etc.
Archery, modern firearms from cheap utilitarian to high-end-more-expensive-than-your-car, black powder firearms, knives (t-o-o-o-ns of knives, especially Pakistani-made Damascus blades), survival gear, pickup trucks (Dodge Ram appeared with a huge array of trucks this year), ATVs and UTVs, tractors, rifle slings, handgun holsters, body armor and related “tactical” stuff (some day I am going to explore exactly what “tactical means, because like the vague and abused term “bushcraft” it can mean a lot of different things), dog cages, recreational boats, tons of camouflage clothing, cowboy boots, wool socks, travel trailers (there are some real neat new additions to the sort of “survivalist” doomsday trailer genre), especially the “OverLand” style kit, which turns a pickup truck into a Swiss Army knife of travel comforts neatly packed into a tidy package, log homes, log furniture and cabin decor, wild game cooking classes…I know I am forgetting something.
And in case you have not read this fact before, I am the guy who started the 2013 boycott of the old Reed Exhibitions show, which predated this current show. It started in response to their sudden demand that vendors not display AR15 platform rifles, because of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. Our boycott led to the failure of the longstanding Reed show in 2013, which then was taken up by the NRA in 2014. The rest is happy history.
If you do an internet search on this subject, you will find some articles where I was interviewed. My favorite line from those interviews was “The British did not understand us Americans in 1776, and they still don’t understand us in 2012.”
We are in 2025 now, twelve or thirteen years later, and based on things that many British politicians and police are saying about extraditing Americans violating their speech laws, it sure seems the British still do not understand or respect Americans.
If you enjoy any kind of hands-on outdoor recreation, namely hunting, fishing, camping, hiking, boating, then this show is definitely for you. The entrance fee is $15.00 per person per day, although there are probably various discounts and bulk purchases that I do not understand. They are out there if you look.
And if anyone sees famous political activist Scott Presler there, please call me. I am a pathetic groupie of his, and I spent all yesterday looking for Scott, like a lost and sad little puppy. He said he would be at the Great American Outdoor Show…
Want to feel good? Go to the PA Farm Show!
The Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg, PA, has been an annual event for something like 160 years. Over that time the Farm Show building complex has grown and grown and grown. The large, beautiful, evocative Art Deco facade remains visible on most of the buildings seen from Maclay and Cameron Streets, while the buildings themselves have multiplied in size and number, especially over the past 25 years.
While the Farm Show itself is ever so slowly evolving with time, mostly from technology changes, its direct connection to agriculture and farm life remains. Agricultural organizations like 4H and FFA remain front and center in much of the activities, including the kids’ bull riding rodeo and horse barrel vaulting competitions we watched last Saturday night. Hands-on activities include all kinds of food, fiber, and animals like sheep, goats (the baby goat snuggling place returned this year and it was overwhelmed with people wanting to snuggle with adorable baby goats), cows, horses of all size, chickens and chicks, ducks, rabbits, pigs etc. are all available for close-up viewing and or holding and petting.
While there is always food available in abundance, I was pleased to see a revamped and larger PA maple syrup stand, with more products. Hate to admit it, but I am a big fan of real maple syrup. When I am not making it myself in my own maple stand, I buy between four and six gallons a year. While 99% of maple syrup is made through the reverse osmosis process now, with no cooking or maybe a very brief flash heat at its end, it is still a unique flavor that I crave all year long.
I make my own maple syrup the old-fashioned way: Collect sap from my own maple stands with old fashioned spiles and buckets, wood or propane fire under a large stainless steel evaporation pan with a spigot, constant stirring, regular addition of maple sap until the syrup reaches an almost-done consistency. Then I tap it off the evaporation pan and finish it off in pots and pans inside the house on the stove top. Takes me about 16-20 hours to boil down sixty gallons of sap. Fact: Nothing commercially available tastes anything like my own home-made, deep brown, super rich maple syrup. I think the heat really augments the maple flavor. Anyhow, I am digressing.
Old tractors, new tractors, out-buildings, clothing, boots, hats, you name it, all kinds of neat stuff is available. The only cost is parking, and that amount depends on where you park.
If you are looking to feel good, because Lord knows we all have burned out on politics and everyone is looking for opportunities to shake off the misery, go visit the PA Farm Show. It runs until this Saturday night. You will not regret it. If nothing else, you will be reminded that the food we all eat does not in fact grow in styrofoam containers in the grocery store. Rather, our food is grown on farms, and then through an elaborate and energy-intensive route it ends up on our dinner plate. Unless you grow your own food, this is how you eat. That lesson alone is a worthy reason to take kids to the PA Farm Show.
Nina got a new Stetson at the Farm Show
Have a wonderful Xmas+ season, friends
Whatever your nationality, nation of origin, religion of origin or religious practice or faith, if you live in America, it is Christmas time. For orthodox Christians this time of the year has a special meaning, and for everyone else it absolutely must be just barely a notch below how orthodox Christians feel.
No Grinches allowed, only happiness and goodwill towards our fellow human being. You do not have to be Christian to enjoy Christmas, to go with the cheerful, happy flow, to give your annoying neighbor or co-worker a bit of leeway, to give someone the go-ahead at the opposite stop sign. Do it, it will feel good.
Wish people “Merry Christmas!” and see how happy they are to hear the earnest expression of our national holiday, two words that were almost obliterated from the American lexicon for fear of “offending” someone.
Hey, if you are actually offended by hearing Merry Christmas here in America, for a grand total of two weeks, then America is probably not for you. Take your unhappiness and lack of appreciation for our solid, stable society to someplace else.
Having just returned from some much-needed beach time and saltwater fishing, I am having to move fast into the snow, ice, and wood fire mode. Trapping season is upon me (I always wait for rifle season to end, so there are fewer people in the woods, and I also wait for bobcat and fisher seasons to start, so I don’t have to release those two prize species before their seasons start), as well as the late flintlock season.
Some fruit trees need major pruning, and a couple need a copper sulfate spray before spring arrives.
Good luck to everyone who is headed to the outdoors for more, whether it is skiing, hunting, ice skating, snow shoeing. Eat it up, drink it up, relish it, because in a few weeks it will all be over, and we will then be looking at Freezing February and then the glimmers of Spring in March.
Until then, Merry Christmas, everyone!
and you don’t have to be Christian to like Christmas
As much as I favor wintertime over all other seasons, there is no substitute for having morning coffee on a patio under a tropical sky, while everything back home is frozen solid
Everglades City Museum Xmas tree made of crab traps and trap buoys. This is folk art!
A limit of sea trout fed us well for several days
Even manatees can get into the holiday spirit
Rum and Coke time is never as good as when one is watching a tropical sunset over an ocean somewhere
Is sitting in a box actually hunting?
Hunting season is cold, and getting outside to seek deer or bear or really any other wild game animal requires a person to put up with some level of discomfort. You can put a lot of effort into hunting, and still come up empty handed. So to up the odds of escaping the attention of deer and bear, some hunters created hunting blinds up in trees. The least difficult ones were railroad sikes driven into a tree to be used as a ladder, and we would hoist ourselves up onto a stout lower limb, and there wait for a shot at a passing deer.
The truly old tree blinds from the 1930s and 1940s were ridiculously frail, made of random assortments of surplus lumber; practically death traps as soon as they were nailed up to living trees. The better old fashioned tree stands would usually be put on what we called an “Indian tree,” where someone a long time ago had deliberately bent over and caused a tree to grow parallel with the ground.
When the horizontal bent limb was at least a foot in diameter, enterprising hunters would find creative ways to attach a stable platform, usually reached by a dangerous rickety wooden ladder made out of woods trash and nails. Platforms ranged from plywood to rough cut boards, some with railings and tattered old olive drab canvas and maybe a stool. Deluxe versions had some sort of roof or covering to keep rain, snow, and sunshine off of the hunter. These elevated hunting blinds were usually eight to ten feet up off the ground, and if the rickety blind did not fall down and kill you, the hunter, then you could usually use it to kill a deer. Despite requiring skill just to stay in them, these blinds were always in demand, and elders got first dibs.
Here I am talking about the American Northeast, and Pennsylvania, specifically. Not about India, where the elevated machan gave hunters of dangerous game not only an opportunity to shoot before being detected by tigers and leopards, but a chance to get in at least one more shot or even a stabbing blow with a spear before the claws and fangs were at your throat.
Fast forward fifty years, and now elevated blinds are everywhere. But they are not like the old rickety kinds jimmied onto trees with long spikes us older guys fondly recall. Witness the rise of the elevated box blinds, which are light years ahead of the rickety wooden tree stands in use when I was a kid. These new ones look like Martian landers, and are sold along the side of RT. 15 from Duncannon to Williamsport, as well as anywhere farm machinery and grains are sold, or even in Amish farm yards.
These modern elevated hunting blinds are airtight, have windows that open and close, and safe ladders or steps made of treated lumber of metal. They are downright sophisticated, and one farm lease I know of has propane heaters in all of their elevated “huts” where guys literally cook their breakfast while waiting for a deer to show up out one of the sliding windows. Some of them are big enough to hold a whole family, and indeed these are like little remote hunting cabin outposts, where everyone from Pap to the youngest kids can comfortably take a poke at a deer from a steady rest with plenty of quiet encouragement around them.
The question is, Is this elevated box blind business actually hunting?
My four-plus-inch-thick 1987 Random House Dictionary (the resilient if lonely, unknown cornerstone of our written culture) says Hunt: To chase or search for game or other wild animals for the purpose of catching or killing.
How much chasing or searching do you see going on from the ubiquitous elevated box blinds?
Not a lot. Well, none. Shouldn’t hunting involve actual pursuit and physical exertion? Don’t we need to earn our kills?
Go on YouTube or Rumble, and you can watch hundreds of “hunting” videos of hunters sitting in elevated box blinds, overlooking crop fields and power lines. These hunters usually have a long period of self-discussion to their camera about what they are looking for, any shots taken and misses they have had, etc. They have tripods and bipods, heaters, shelves with food, windows, and are generally protected from the punishing elements that mark hunting season.
The most dispiriting of this video genre has little kids holding forth, as if experienced adults, about the relative merits of various bucks caught on cell camera trail cams that very morning, and whether or not any of them are good enough for our young camerman.
And so I think we have to ask if this elevated box blind is not really hunting, then is it good for hunting? If maintained as a hunting method after their first one or two confidence building kills, the little kids are for sure being ruined by this stuff. Because it is not reality.
People who think that hunting season solely involves sitting in one spot all day, especially an enclosed and elevated spot, and then stiffly climbing down to either bitch about the lack of deer or worse, to boast about one’s prowess whacking “the big one“, are not hunters. They are shooters. If they have at all practiced target shooting before season, and they have some huge Hubble Telescope mounted on their Million Magnum Blastem Rifle, then surely they can make that three hundred yard shot on some unsuspecting deer eating dinner in a crop field.
Sorry to be negative about this, but we are losing our souls to these elevated blinds. Yes, they make hunting season more comfortable, and they make ambushing and surprising our quarry easier, but they are really dumbing down and whittling off our hunting instincts and skills, our woodcraft that separates us from the flatlander slobs who have no self reliance abilities. Hunting is not supposed to be easy, or comfortable, it is supposed to test us and make us earn the trophies we kill.
In Europe and Asia, hunting was used until the 1800s by warriors to hone their combat skills. Nothing like dismounting your horse to face off at ground level with a mean 4,000 pound Gaur or a ferocious 1,000 pound wild boar, armed with a stout spear in hand and a short sword at your hip. Back then, hunters were tough. As were our own American Longhunters on our frontier.
You want to actually hunt? Go do a deer drive like the BNB Outdoors kids, or with The Hunting Public guys. Or take a quiet, slow still hunt woods walk like John does at Leatherwood Outdoors. These hunts take skill and effort, which is the heart and soul of the chase. Everything else is just a hands-on video game at this point. No thanks.
A deer taken while still hunting two weeks ago, with open sights. Don’t look too closely, it was hit between the eyes.
Checking nearby cell cameras to see where the deer are while sitting in a blind…
Not picking on anyone here, but you boys can do better than this
Calling Elon Musk, we have landed on Mars
PA is at Peak Rut, so just do it
I drove through farmland, mountains, and valleys a couple days ago, and I swear to you, no lie, I saw a huge stud buck out in every field I went by. Half were alone, half were with a doe. Some of these monsters were standing close to the highway, which explains why the highways I drove on were littered with dead bucks from car collisions.
We have deer literally coming out of our ears. And not just any deer, but freaking huge trophy bucks that were unimaginable when I was a kid, and an adult. These are trophy animals by any standard, whether you hunt in Illinois, Ohio, Iowa, or Indiana.
Twenty four years ago, Pennsylvania entered uncharted waters and started a new deer management program. I was peripherally involved as a mostly bystander with field level fifty yard line seats. The PA Game Commission’s new deer management methodology was biologically sound, but untested in modern times. And because it involved axe murdering about fifty percent or more of the standing doe population, and setting aside all the small bucks, almost every old timer hunter went into a kiniption fit.
Families fell apart, PGC commissioners and staff wore bulletproof vests to PGC board meetings, people’s tires were slashed, hunting clubs dissolved, and for about fifteen years PA’s political map was turned upside down. Go ahead and laugh all you flatlanders, go ahead, yuk it up. What a bunch of rubes, what a bunch of rednecks and hayseed hillbillies…who in their right mind cares about deer management so much that literally our state politics got turned upside down?
Fun fact: Hunting in Pennsylvania is about a $1.5 Billion annual industry, and maybe more than that. Hunting is a sustainable, renewable, ecologically sound industry. For just a few months a year. So a lot is at stake when changes are made to the hunting system. It isn’t just hillbilly farmers who like to hunt who are impacted by hunting regulations here, it is literally every small rural town that has a restaurant or two, the deer processors, the hunting clothing manufacturers. Hunting in PA is big business.
So when I say that I saw all these huge bucks the other day, it means that the PGC deer management program, which began with a small mushroom cloud in 2000, is now working as planned like a Swiss watch. You don’t get to see government actually do positive things very often, or implement policies that work, but in this instance we did, we do. The PA Game Commission deserves a lot of credit for both using sound biology AND stoically enduring the brutal politics that followed.
Right now PA is at peak rut, meaning the bucks are in full rut, horned up and lookin’ for love. Like all stupid men chasing tail, huge bucks that are otherwise almost impossible to get near (because they are smart as hell) can now easily find themselves broadside to a bow and arrow at fifteen yards. So go do it, git yerself sum.
May I recommend a few things?
First, whatever skills you developed in the early archery season, they are now only partly applicable. Because rutting bucks are wanderers, the bucks you scouted and marked down in October could be the next county over. This means that you cannot just set up over a trail and wait. You need to lure in the wandering bucks, and that can be done with doe pee (https://kirschnerdeerlure.com/ get the SilverTop), a sparingly used grunt call, or rattling antlers. This also means that bucks from the next county over will be wandering around where you hunt.
Second, work hard on concealing your blinds. Especially your ground blinds. Man, nothing is more garish and glaring than a poorly concealed ground blind. I see guys just setting a blind out in the open and hoping a deer won’t notice. But guys, come on, the deer might now see you inside the blind, but THEY CAN SEE YOUR BLIND and they are spooked by it. It is an unnatural thing on the landscape. So tuck your blind back into the edge of the woods and brush it in well, so that it blends in with the surroundings.
Happy hunting, and just do it, get yourself one of PA’s unbelievable trophy bucks wandering around hill and dale right now. And do not forget to thank PGC personnel when you see them, because they are the ones who implemented the outstanding deer management policy that we are all benefiting from now.